The Wager

eBook

Published April 18, 2022 by Doubleday.

ISBN:
978-0-385-53427-7
Copied ISBN!
4 stars (3 reviews)

On January 28, 1742, a ramshackle vessel of patched-together wood and cloth washed up on the coast of Brazil. Inside were thirty emaciated men, barely alive, and they had an extraordinary tale to tell. They were survivors of His Majesty’s Ship the Wager, a British vessel that had left England in 1740 on a secret mission during an imperial war with Spain. While the Wager had been chasing a Spanish treasure-filled galleon known as “the prize of all the oceans,” it had wrecked on a desolate island off the coast of Patagonia. The men, after being marooned for months and facing starvation, built the flimsy craft and sailed for more than a hundred days, traversing nearly 3,000 miles of storm-wracked seas. They were greeted as heroes.

But then… six months later, another, even more decrepit craft landed on the coast of Chile. This boat contained just three castaways, and they …

2 editions

Great story, very well told

5 stars

I seem to be getting increasingly partial to historic voyages, so some bias here. But the author manages to flesh out characters with a lot of (clearly flagged) speculation to fill in blanks. He also resists spoiling the result of the 280 year old story.

If you like starvation and scurvy, this book has a lot.

avatar for dht6000

rated it

3 stars